I don’t know for sure, but my semi-educated guess is that they would not recognize a conversion as conferring no foul at that time. They’d probably see the conversion itself as a crime. After all, Mosaic law doesn’t say that it’s ok to worship idols if you convert to idol worship.
As to the cleansing of the Temple, you’re right about everything. In addition, he could not ahve possibly literally cleared the courtyards. That would have been akin to clearing the concourse of a football stadium during the Superbowl.
I think Diogenes is right. As I understand it, Judaism was - and indeed is - not so much a matter of what you believe, but of how you live. And Jews are not Jews because they observe the Law; rather, they observe the Law because they are Jews. A Jew who decides that observing the Law is unnecessary and ceases to observe it does not cease to be a Jew; he just becomes an unobservant Jew. And this remains true even if the reason for disregarding the Law happens to be because he has adopted a Christian or pagan faith.
Jesus was a Jew by birth, and there was simply no way in which he could cease to be Jewish. Same goes for every other person born a Jew. I don’t know, though, what the position would be for someone who converts to Judaism and subsquently reverts to another religion.
If you convert to Judaism, you’re a Jew, period. Well, almost period. There are one or two things a convert isn’t allowed to do, like marry a kohen (or become king, not that that comes up much anymore). But, in terms of a convert reverting to their previous religion, that’s just as bad as if somebody born Jewish converted to that religion.
You can’t always judge timing of events by how they appear in the Gospels, but it is worth noting that Mark and Matthew put the clearing of the temple immediately following the triumphal entry. Is there any reason to believe that Jesus didn’t have a few thousand followers with him when was turning over the tables, blocking the flow of goods and healing the poor?
Just because the Sunday-school version has Jesus doing this all single-handedly doesn’t mean that’s what the text really means. Discussing the logistics of how Jesus pulled it off doesn’t add to the meaning the writers wanted to convey.
John puts the attack on the Temple before the triumphal entry.
The text in none of the Gospels says or implies that that Jesus had thousands of people helping him clear the Temple.
The triumphal entry is probably a literary construction (you can tell because Matthew misunderstands a passage from the LXX and has Jesus riding simultaneously on two different animals), and it’s not very plausible (a guy riding into Jerusalem during Passover, and being hailed by a mob as the rightful King of the Jews would have been immediately arrested and killed by the Romans without any need to pass Go, or vist the Temple), but even if he had some kind of following going into the Temple, it’s highly implausible that they would have assisted him in attacking their own most sacred site.
The odd thing about the attack on the Temple is that the moneychangers and those selling the animals weren’t doing anything wrong. They weren’t dishonest or unethical, and they had a necessary role in the Temple’s function. There was nothing corrupt about them. John says that Jesus was preventing people from being able to buy animals, and throwing the animals out of the courtyard, something that makes no sense in light of the fact that the entire raison d’etre of the Temple was to sacrifice animals. That’s what it was there for. That was it’s function. Driving out all the apparatus for facilitating the sacrifices (sacrifices mandated by the Torah) was not a “cleansing” of the Temple, it was an attack on the institution itself, a rejection of its very purpose.
Why he did it is anybody’s guess. The Gospels seem confused about it and try to concoct explanations, but there seems to have been a core accusation (denied by the synoptics, but admitted by John) that Jesus said something about wanting to destroy the Temple. That is not something he would have been successful in inciting a mob of Jews to assist him with.
I’ve no idea whether this is a point raised in textual criticism, but to me the inconsistencies and different spins on things taken by the Gospels is one of the things that make them fascinating to me. Far from showing them to be something false concocted out of whole cloth, they are at times a bit confused and inconsistent just as you’d expect in trying to look back on something that really did happen at least a generation or two ago and attempting to explain, “what on earth was that all about?”
You’re saying that because the Gospels are contradictory, it makes them more likely to be accurate?
Also the accounts of the resurrection are not ‘a bit confused and inconsistent’. The Gospels disagree on everything: who entered the Tomb, when they arrived, who they found there and what happened next. Similarly with the reappearence of Jesus.
If God really did exist, couldn’t He have got His followers to write a single accurate contemporary account? (Preferably on tablets of stone).
To claim that Jesus rose from the dead, you should have much better evidence than a few disorganised secondhand eye-witness recollections collected generations later.
I think he means that the inconsistencies lend credence to the facts that the gospels have in common. Obviously, they did not get together and say “let’s make sure we get our stories straight.”
If you asked different people to recount stories of the same event they had heard about from their grandparents, you would get inconsistent and contradictory information on some points. But in places where they agreed, you would have some confidence that those pieces of the story were accurate.
Edited to add: I do recognize that there is evidence that Matthew & Luke borrowed directly from Mark, and likely another source as well.
I disagree with everybody but somebody prove this wrong. Only two gospels (and there are many more than the Biblical four) bother with a Nativity at all and they disagree. Usually it is taken that Matthew is right and Luke wrong, but then that Matthew was wrong in a different way. I think that’s rubbish: Luke is quite accurate and Matthew wants to bring Herod the Great into the story.
Luke says clearly that Jesus was conceived when Herod was King of Judea and born during a Roman census. Census occurred every 15 years but naturally it was only held where Rome ruled direct. An allied King like Herod payed his dues and how he raised them was his own business. In any case known censusses fall outside of the usual times expected for Jesus. The only was Jesus can be conceived when Herod is King but born during a Roman census is if rule has passed from Herod to Rome in the interim and naturally, Rome wants to make its own tax assessment.
This happened in the year 6CE. The trouble is that Herod is a dynastic name like Caesar. Herod the Great was a very well-known man. It is very probably that he had designs for an empire of his own because Rome had only stabilised under a new system after most of a century of civil war and there was no certainty of a successor or even precise definition of just what post Augustus really held (Mao played a similar game - no properly defined powers, so enormous unofficial ones). The grandeur of Herod’s building (he built a lot of Hellenistic cities as well as the Temple Complex) and Herods ruling just about every independent state in the area suggest that. If anybody 70 and more years later had heard of a Herod it was The Great. That is the trouble.
I believe that when Luke says ‘Herod king of Judea’ he means Herod Arkhelaus, Herod the Great’s great-nephew, Tetrarch of Judea from The Great’s death in 4BCE until Rome deposed him by popular demand for his arbitrary taxation and general misrule in 6CE. Tax inequities were high on the charges against him, so for that alone Rome would want a census. Herod’s kingdom was divided between four great-nephews - all of course called Herod Something.
Luke says Jesus went on the road ‘in or about his 30th year’. So he’s 29 and this is 35 or 36. This is very significant. It means that his mission lasted at most about a year because in 36 Pontius Pilatus left for Rome under a cloud for his own ten years of misrule. It also means that Pilate would have been very edgy and very unsure of what to do but to be seen to be doing something to please all sides. By all accounts he was ignorant of and insensitive to Jewish matters and open to bribery.
I believe the Crucifixion was ‘fixed’ - possibly even double-fixed and counter-bribed so that Pilate could keep all sides happy as long as a revived Jesus disappeared. He might just get away with his own head, depending on what Tiberius thought of his report. At the time, Tiberius was as ancient as crock and paranoid, and had never been easy-going. Prospects for Pilate looked bad except that he arrived on the day Rome was celebrating his friend Caligula’s accession and demanding to throw Tiberius’s corpse into the Tiber (Tiberius in Tiberem!)
Luke’s dating works. Matthew’s doesn’t, but it’s a better story. Remember, where Nazareth (correctly Natsareth) is supposed to have stood there is no sign of it then but there is the big town of Sepphoris being rebuilt that is never mentioned in the New Testament. Herod the Great did kill a lot of children - but they were his own and quite grown up at the time. If the first ones weren’t plotting to overthrow him, the later ones probably were. Augustus also had most potential successors assassinated.
Archelaus was Herod the Great’s son, not his nephew.
You’re mostly correct. Under Herod, Palestine was a client kingdom, not subject to census or tax. That was the deal Herod got for siding with Augustus during the Roman civil war. After Herod died, his kingdom was divided up between his sons. Herod Antipas (the King in the gospels who killed John the Baptist, and who wanted to see Jesus do magic tricks) got Galilee (the region where Jesus was from). Archelaus got Judea (where Jerusalem was located). Archelaus was removed by Rome for general incompetence in 6 CE, and Judea (just Judea, not Galilee, which remained under the jurisdiction of Antipas) was annexed as part of the province of Syria. That was when Quirinius was required to conduct a census. There was no census conducted in Judea before Quirinius.
Your hypothesis that Jesus was born in 6 CE cannot be falsified, but using Luke as the basis for it is a non-starter since nothing in Luke;s account is any more credible than in Matthew’s, particularly the nonsense about people having to return to ancestral home (a decree that would not have applied to Joseph and Mary in any case if they lived in Galilee).
One point that may support you is that it would jibe better with Josephus’ implied dating for the death of John the Baptist.
Your suggestion that the crucifixion and resurrection were staged is, I think far fetched. the claims of a physical resurrection were late developing,. The empty tomb does not appear in Christian literature until 40 years after the crucifixion, the first accounts of physical appearnaces 10 years after that.
Before then, what we have is Paul making vague claims for “appearances,” but not describing the nature of these appearances. He never mentions an empty tomb, he draws no distinction between the nature of Jesus’ appearances to the disciples and to himself, and actually denies that physical resurrections are possible, calling people “fools” for believing it.
I think the resurrection myth started as visionary experiences, and were only later literalized as a physical resuscitation.